In early May the networks couldn’t ignore the compelling testimony of State Department officials, including the number-two diplomat at the U.S. embassy Gregory Hicks, that undermined Obama administration claims about the Benghazi attack. CBS’s David Martin, on the May 5 Evening News, reported: “In an interview with the House Oversight Committee...Hicks directly contradicts administration claims that at first, the attack was thought to be nothing more than a demonstration growing out of a similar protest that day in Cairo. ‘I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go. I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.’”

NBC’s Brian Williams, on the May 8 Nightly News, relayed Hicks delivered an “emotional testimony” and “chilling account of what really happened in Libya,” in his congressional hearing that day. ABC’s Diane Sawyer, on the May 9 World News, teased her viewers: “dramatic story told today by people at the center during that attack in Benghazi last year, people who said they were pleading for help.” Interestingly, for all the talk of Hicks’ “emotional” and “dramatic” story none of the networks brought Hicks on to retell it in a live exclusive interview at the time. (Hicks was finally interviewed on the September 8 edition of ABC’s This Week, where he told anchor George Stephanopoulos he’s been “punished” for speaking out.)

Altogether the networks devoted a total of only five days of coverage to Hicks, beginning on May 5 and ending on the morning of May 9, the day after Hicks’s congressional testimony.

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